The path that ultimately led me to Terametric began as a bit of a quest. Working for years in the marketing and advertising industry, I’d fielded client and executive questions of measurement and performance hundreds of times.

In the early days we talked in terms of reach and frequency, CPM and a bit later, impressions.  We’d proudly say things like, “this TV buy will reach 60% of your target with an average frequency of 3.6.”  Or, “Our PR outreach effort yielded 687,000 impressions.”  The client’s eyes would momentarily brighten at the size of the figures and then inevitably the questions would come.

• “What’s the average number of impressions?”
• “What’s a good frequency?”
• “Is that enough reach, too much?

Those shrewd clients and executives were really asking, “What does this mean in terms of performance?”  By performance, I’m talking about the degree to which something achieves a desired result.

Enter Web 2.0, the social environment.

A new frontier opened up.  Conversations were occurring, in real-time, across communities, networks and social outposts.  People were talking.  Even more importantly, people were talking about brand experiences. Quite suddenly, the world was awash in social monitoring and measurement purveyors.

We, marketing service providers, began to say things like, “You got 726 mentions around that topic.”  Or, “Your share of voice increased by 20%.” Or even better, “Positive sentiment around your product is trending up.”  Clients and executives would be pleased that counts of various things seemed to be on the increase but inevitably, those same questions rose.

• “How many mentions is a good number?”
• “What’s an average share of voice for our industry category?”
• “What should our sentiment target be?”

They were really asking, “What do these figures mean in terms performance?”  So the quest began.  I searched high and low, reviewing and trialing this tool or that solution, trying to answer those questions.  I dog paddled through a sea of data visualizations, swam upstream through rivers of news and plunged headlong into automated sentiment trackers to no avail.

And then, I met Wendy Troupe.  She had taken a algorithm used initially to predict mutual fund performance and altered its data inputs and scoring methodology to quantify marketing performance.  She could literally measure a company’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers.  I knew this was something different.  I jumped aboard and off we went.

Fast-forward seven months and we find ourselves in our pilot client’s conference room.  Our Benchmark Assessment dashboard remains projected on the wall and there’s a moment of silence.  We’ve just delivered our report on their comprehensive and channel specific marketing performance to date.  Each channel has been scored 1-100 according to its current ability to attract, engage and retain customers.  We’ve demonstrated how to drill down, through the tool, and get at the underlying factors driving that performance.  Our tool provided a detailed roadmap at both a strategic and tactical level for improving that performance.

I braced for the questions but shouldn’t have.  We’d already answered them.  Instead, our client began to talk about prioritizing channel initiatives to achieve performance goals.  My quest, and hopefully yours, had come to an end.

Photo by the talented Kaysse

Tags: marketing measurement, marketing performance

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 7:28 AM by MattC and is filed under Social Media ROI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.